MOUNT VERNON — Barbara Martinez Jitner, creator of the documentary “La Frontera,” will be the keynote speaker at the 2008 Feminist Symposium hosted by the Third Wave Resource Group at Cornell College on Saturday, March 15.
Martinez Jitner’s lecture, “Femicide at our U.S. border,” is at 3 p.m. in Hedges Conference Room in The Commons. A reception will follow. Admission is free to the lecture and other symposium activities, which take place in The Commons from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
The symposium showcases scholarship from the fields of English, sociology, politics, art history, musicology, and biology. Topics include “Divorce and Democracy in Egypt,” sin and Eve in “Paradise Lost,” sexual harassment in small business, and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse.
Martinez Jitner went undercover in Juarez, Mexico, 50 yards South of the U.S. border, as a factory worker, to investigate the intersection of poverty, gender discrimination and sexual abuse that led to Juarez being coined “The Capital of Murdered Women.” Working with Amnesty International and superstar Jennifer Lopez, Barbara will outline steps that will empower listeners so they may stop the femicide that is occurring only 50 yards away from the United States.
The aim of the Feminist Symposium is to raise awareness of the academic, interdisciplinary nature of Women’s Studies programs. The goal of the Symposium is to begin a dialogue and encourage the community to challenge their individual and cultural definitions of feminism.